Hamline University DigitalCommons@Hamline Departmental Honors Projects College of Liberal Arts Spring 2016 Revolution, Redemption, and Romance: Reading Constructions of Filipino Spanish American Identities and Politics of Knowledge in Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo alongside Filipino American Fiction Steven Beardsley Hamline University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/dhp Part of the Asian American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Modern Languages Commons, and the Spanish Literature Commons Recommended Citation Beardsley, Steven, "Revolution, Redemption, and Romance: Reading Constructions of Filipino Spanish American Identities and Politics of Knowledge in Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo alongside Filipino American Fiction" (2016). Departmental Honors Projects. 49. https://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/dhp/49 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts at DigitalCommons@Hamline. It has been accepted for inclusion in Departmental Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Hamline. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Revolution, Redemption, and Romance: Reading Constructions of Filipino Spanish American Identities and Politics of Knowledge in Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo alongside Filipino American Fiction Steven Beardsley An Honors Thesis Submitted for partial fulfillment of the requirements For graduation with honors in the English & Modern Languages Departments From Hamline University 29 April 2016 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my family, particularly my mother and father for supporting me in my scholarly pursuits. My mother has also been a source of insight into the culture of the Philippines and my desire to learn more about and articulate my own experiences growing up Filipino. That said, I would also like to thank the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC), Spectrum, and the Hedgeman Center for giving me the tools to explore my racial and ethnic heritage and other intersecting social identities. Special thanks to Professor Timothy August when he taught the class titled, “Asian American Identities” at Saint Catherine’s University. His support of my individual projects on Filipino migration and identity formation inspired me to conduct a “Filipino American Writers in the American Diaspora” independent study as well as read Filipino American literature within Asian American literary studies. I would also like to thank the English and Modern Languages Departments at Hamline University for cultivating and supporting my scholarly pursuits as well as giving the opportunity to students within these Departments to conduct honors projects. I would especially like to thank individual members of my committee from the oral defense. Beginning with professors within Hamline University, Professor Mark Olson for his copy editing as well as his advising and support throughout my four years at Hamline University; he has also been invaluable in seeing how queer and feminist frameworks work within this project. Professor Katherine Bjork of History for her insight into the historical implications of Rizal as an appropriated figure during and after the war of 1898 despite his death prior and for asking critical questions of the historical context employed in the project. Professor María Jesús Leal for her teaching of the course in Spanish “The Generation of 1898” that inspired connections to Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno and biographer W.E. Retana. My outside committee member, Antonio Dorca of Macalester College for his insight in changing the project’s title to reflect the complexities of integrating Rizal with Filipino American Fiction. Last but not least, special thanks to Professor Veena Deo of English for many hours spent going over theoretical issues within the process and being there during the arduous revision and research process. I owe a great deal of gratitude for all that I have learned from Professor Deo and her support when it came to integrating complex postcolonial theories and issues while reading Rizal alongside Filipino American Writers. Abstract This project analyzes the literary works and the iconic role of Filipino nationalist José Rizal before, during, and after the Spanish American War of 1898. Rizal’s social activism and writing inspired a revolution against the Friarocracy in the Philippines. He also influenced Filipino American writers who reference Rizal’s construction of the Filipino woman in Christianity and Filipinos fighting against colonial oppression. Additionally, Filipino American writers illustrate how being Filipino in the US today is a transcultural experience rather than a simple binary of traditional Philippines and modern America. Recognizing Spain as an earlier colonizing force is critical in understanding the complexities evoked by Filipino American writers. Thus, the primary focus of this project is to read Rizal’s works through a concept that postcolonial literary theorist, Homi Bhabha, calls an interstitial cultural space as well as to read Filipino American texts “awry” as proposed by Martin Joseph Ponce to show how Filipino Spanish American identities have been constructed. This project analyzes how Spanish writers and historians such as Unamuno and W.E. Retana have appropriated Rizal as the quintessential Filipino Spaniard of the Philippines. Additionally, this project addresses how American historian and biographer Austin Craig also appropriated Rizal as the quintessential representation of a “brown race” of Filipinos for American imperialistic purposes after Spanish colonialism. In addition, the project analyzes Rizal’s two novels: Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo alongside two Filipino American texts to argue that the Philippines is a country whose cultural history and literature must be defined in the context of both Spanish and United States colonialisms. Reading Rizal deconstructively elucidates how Filipino literature gestures to the United States, Philippines, and Spain and does not belong rigidly to a single national context. This study, then, suggests that Filipino American literature must be read transculturally and separately from Asian American literary studies and recognized as signifying a complex and fluid transcultural context. In other words, in agreement with Ponce, this study “un-ones” Asian American literary studies, unsettling Filipino American literature’s place in a discourse in which language is a terrain of struggle and contention between dominant colonial and marginalized voices. Table of Contents Preface .............................................................................................................................. i Introduction ...................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 .......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 3 .......................................................................................................................... 43 Chapter 4 .......................................................................................................................... 64 Notes ................................................................................................................................ 69 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 71 Preface This project began out of a personal interest to read Asian American literature in the English Department. I cultivated this interest as a member of the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC), a student group at Hamline University dedicated to learning about Asian Americans in the United States. APAC gave me the opportunity to participate in events such as Lunar New Year and also attend the Midwest Asian American Students’ Union Conference (MAASU). From participating as an active member of APAC, I realized that the organization was limited when it came to addressing Filipino American identity and subjectivity and related issues. I decided that I wanted to learn more about Filipino American identity in the context of history of Filipino Americans in the United States, in addition to what exactly constituted an “authentic” Filipino identity. At the advice of Professor Veena Deo, I took a class at St. Catherine University, titled “Asian American Identities,” that had an interdisciplinary approach in which we critiqued and analyzed representations of Asian Americans in history, film, videos, books, and other contemporary discourse. The class gave me an opportunity to conduct research on Filipino Americans and the subsequent generations that immigrated to the U.S., in addition to learning about “Rizal Day” as an important national holiday in the Philippines and as a holiday recently celebrated in California. The class also raised questions about how Filipino Americans are portrayed in literature, how they are constructed in American culture, and why had I not heard of any important Filipino American figures and writers, let alone important